I’ve been sneaking away from my actual desk to do work at every and any opportunity this past year. My office has been feeling cluttered, cramped, and… not a space I’ve wanted to be in. Some of that is natural, I think, the usual desire to vary the space in which I’m working. I like to escape to a coffee house, for example, and find the hum of random noise in which to work, and grab a good beverage or snack to accompany the task at hand. Even with the noise, the distractions seem fewer most of the time than when I’m working at home.

But outside escapes also tend to work better for certain kinds of tasks, and with summer’s arrival I’m ready to reclaim my office. And I’ve also decided it’s time for a make-over of my home workspace too.

This year I’m trying a significant experiment: a standing desk setup. I’ve had friends endorse these, and have mostly nodded at the mention of standing desks but kept a distance. This past year, though, I’ve been finding myself with increasing back and shoulder problems. I’ve also seen a plethora of reminders that sedentary professions are unhealthy (e.g., here and here, for starters.) So I’m giving the standing desk a go.

I’m starting it with an inexpensive Ikea hack to see if I like the arrangement first, before investing in something more permanent. I created a standing desk following mods of this model, all for something in the range of about $25-30. I also added a cushioned floormat to help my legs and back, which seemed essential. These go for anywhere from $35-100, good and lasting ones probably about $50-60 and up. I have a monitor on top with a keyboard, and my laptop, peripherals, speakers, scanner, etc. all rigged with a universal docking station.

Also got the rest of the desk in an “L” shape for other kinds of work. My plan is to keep both options open — sitting and standing — and leave it so I can alternate easily. Stand a few hours, mostly for email and lighter tasks, sit for the heavier work of translation or hard-core writing. I’m finding already that this also help separate out distractions: email tasks and the inevitable surfing the ‘net seem further separated, both in time and on separate monitors & spaces. So perhaps this will have multiple payoffs in terms of both health and productivity.
We’ll see how it pans out… In the meantime, here’s an image of my setup. I’ve used plastic cables at the moment (rather than bolts and washers, etc.) to fasten the shelf arms to the desk. I did this in order to keep the height settings flexible for the moment, in case I need to make adjustments (yes, waiting for potential aches and pains, as the old gal I am.) The cables are doing an excellent job of holding things tight, though, which is good to see.

Top image: my favorite spot to escape from work, years ago in Taipei… Image by M.G. Chang, who spent a good deal of time there himself.

Maggie Greene (a UMW History alum, for the gang cheering at home) shared a great post today on Chinese lianhuanhua 连环画, or picture storybooks. In particularly, she shared images — and, with the assistance of the very helpful Brendan O’Kane, a cleaned-up .pdf of the full text — of a 1980 Chinese Star Wars illustrated story book. Maggie dives nicely into an exploration of Chinese appropriation and improvisation on the story (as well as some of the odder characterizations that seem to appear along the way.)

The images from the text (see Maggie’s post for a link to the full work) struck me, bringing me back to the kinds of Sci-Fi novels I used to read in my younger days. Or which I would still find, until its recent closure, at a favorite used bookstore in my summers visiting family in Sandwich, Mass.

Neuromancer (1984) may not be quite as vintage a title as the others, yet that cover is definitely vintage 80s, rounding out an earlier collection above.

Meanwhile, another very good discussion happened recently at the Columbia Weatherhead East Asian Institute site, with an interview with Gregory Pflugfelder, associate professor of Japanese history and a long-time collector of materials related to Godzilla movies. Pflugfelder shares images and insights, including the ways in which the significance of Godzilla transcends the simple Japan-U.S. dichotomy and history. Monster movies bear much more meaning in their imagery, and carry much more mileage. All with an interest in cinema and global themes should find the discussion quite useful.

Earlier this spring (ages back in late March, my regrets for the belated post) I attended the Association of Asian Studies annual meeting. I had the welcome opportunity to participate in a roundtable on “Charting the Digital in Asian Studies: Promises, Realities, and the Future of Teaching and Research” organized by Amanda Shuman (who is finishing up an excellent dissertation in 20th c. Chinese history at UCSC). We were joined by Japan historian Alan Christy, who is also Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories at UCSC, along with Maggie Greene (Chinese history, Montana State University), Nick Kapur (post-doctoral fellow, Harvard’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies), and Hilde de Weerdt (Chinese history, Leiden), our round-table chair, who is doing some very interesting work in research and teaching with digital tools and mapping of sources in Chinese correspondence of the Song through Yuan period (~10th – 14th c.)

I’ll have more time to meditate on related topics over the summer. But now, in the meantime, some themes and links of note:

1. LANGUAGE. Alan eloquently raised the issue of language, which has been one I’ve been wrestling with greatly amid curriculum design for undergraduates in East Asian history. As he asked (I’m paraphrasing here): how do we begin to get students to negotiate with the texts (and related media) in whose languages they cannot immediately read or function?

As I sit with my colleagues — particularly folks doing very creative work with undergraduates in U.S. history, in English-language literature, in Anthropology and Sociology, and beyond… but most often with students working in their native languages, and we brainstorm curricular approaches that intersect with digital projects, I’ve found myself having major envy (and, at rarer but real moments, flashes of serious frustration) in regard to source availability and linguistic accessibility for my own undergraduate students exploring Chinese history. While I have worked with a few who have acquired enough Chinese to begin to work with primary sources in the original language, these students are very few and far between (I can count them on one hand in my ten year experience at UMW.)

So Alan’s contribution to the discussion was wonderful — as he suggested, rather than dodging the the language barrier, why not meet it head-on? Bringing students to this project seems an excellent curricular endeavor of its own. Don’t flee the barrier, meet it. One of the most important aspects of a college education, done right, is to help students learn the value of risk-taking, and, yes, at times, failure. Of not-getting something quite “correct.” And, most importantly, of learning the value of experiment and invention. Of tackling a learning curve. From Alan’s own testimony regarding work with Santa Cruz undergraduates on projects in Japanese source material, it’s clear that jumping into an opaque language on the page, then transforming parts of it into something intelligible seems an excellent way to work through that kind of skill and confidence-building.

Alan also spoke to the value of multilingual websites in related projects. The use of multilingual tagging systems is particularly valuable, he noted. Seems a great entry point for students who are just climbing into new languages, and new kinds of global consciousness.

2. JAPAN’S 2011 DISASTER ARCHIVE: Community Archives. The Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters site, shared by Nick Kapur, who’s done wonderful work on it, also seemed to illustrate many of the themes Alan had raised, while also offering, as Nick shared, some great features to learn from.

This archive is one that places community participation at its center. Its features highlight this aim, as Nick detailed. Tagging is very flexible, with users able to add their own tags to any of the archived data they find relevant. Users can add items to the archive, and also build their own collections, which can be set to public or private status. Essays can be also added and presentations can be created.

Language is also a key aspect of the site. Not only is the site available in both English and Japanese, but translation itself is a feature: any logged-in user can add translations of text on the site. In a sense, all users are authors and translators too at this online archive.

3. RESEARCH, SOURCES, & TOOLS: ACCESSIBILITY. Amanda and Maggie both spoke eloquently on this subject at our panel (from two parts of the globe as it happened, thanks to to digital tools and teleconferencing.) Amanda spoke to the comparative ease by which resources for dissertation research on a range of topics on 20th century China might be obtained via electronic sites (e.g. auction blogs) versus the challenges of library access in China today.

Maggie, meanwhile, raised the issue of scholars losing access to much-needed search engines and online research tools upon leaving the research-focused “R1″ institutions they likely trained at as graduate student before making their way into careers at the majority of mainstream universities and colleges elsewhere that can’t necessarily afford these for their libraries. As she noted, our universities seem to be stuck negotiating contracts for such subscription databases in small groups or as individual institutions. Among other insightful notes, Maggie pointed to the German system, which has allowed members of all universities to have the same database access — for more, see Maggie’s own blogging on the topic here regarding a very important issue of disparity in higher education.

Links for my (brief) project introduction at our Association of Asian Studies Roundtable on Saturday, March 29th, entitled “Charting the Digital in Asian Studies: Promises, Realities, and the Future of Teaching and Research”:

TaipingCivilWar.org — the website created by my sophomore methods colloquium at the University of Mary Washington (Fall 2013)

“Reworking the Methods Course” – see for a summary review of the course at its conclusion (and see ongoing posts at this same Detour Ahead blog for discussion of a new version of the course for next fall, one that focuses on the Boxer Uprising.)

“Mapping the Taiping Civil War” – Ryan Brazell, UMW’s talented instructional technology expert who assisted me in both website design and in classroom workshops, offers his own extended blog post on the technical tools and approaches used for the map component of the website. I highly recommend his very helpful post for anyone thinking of jumping in…

Looking for examples of other sites where students are engaged in knowledge creation for a public audience? Jeffrey McClurken (Professor of History, UMW) offered an excellent workshop at the 2014 American Historical Association annual meeting this past January. His own website offers his slide presentation on “Digital History in the Undergraduate Curriculum” as well as his full set of links for the workshop.

Last fall I taught a new colloquium, History 297, as part of a methods sequence required for all majors. As I’ve detailed in previous posts here and here, our department has recently expanded a single-semester methods course into a 2 course sequence, with one course that focuses on historiography and another that’s research centered. One of the reasons we’ve made this change is to allow for more time for curriculum focused on digital fluencies.

I’m still processing the “take-aways” from my efforts in curriculum development in the first round of this course, particularly in relation to digital projects. At the same time, I’m also looking ahead to next fall’s course and imagining its own thematic design. So a bit on the first here, then I’ll introduce the second…

THE COURSE

The aim of the HIST297 “History Colloquium” is to help students become familiar with different sub-fields of history, to gain skills in speaking / writing / secondary research / critical reading & analysis… and, yes, digital fluencies. Main assignments: book review, literature review essay, formal speaking presentations, along with a digital project. Class size is 12-15. Students are usually sophomores or first semester juniors.

I’ve shared a longer post on this project, noting broader questions and also some of what I saw as the strengths of the project, namely:

– Active learning: In having students exploring primary sources for a map and timeline along a secondary source they were reading on the topic, it led to a more active, not passive read of the scholarly monograph – they were literally, through their simultaneous work in primary sources, reading a secondary source by another historican critically, from the inside out, with engaged discussion.

– Student Authorship: Website design = its own kind of authorship, which itself seemed empowering for those involved. In other words, also another kind of more active learning.

– Collaboration: The digital project was very much collaborative work, which is itself a valuable experience to gain. Challenges exist here too, of course, see the original post linked above for more on this issue, and the others too.

LOOKING AHEAD: BOXERS

This coming fall, I’m introducing a new event as theme for the course: the Boxer Uprising of 1900 (also somewhat inaccurately known as the Boxer Rebellion.) This event occurred during the summer of 1900 when the Qing dynasty’s imperial army along with peasant “Boxer” troops opposed to Westerners and especially missionary presence in China besieged Beijing’s legation quarter. Making world-wide news for fifty-five days until an alliance of international troops stormed the capital city, looting as they went, this conflict has left a rich collection of primary sources for today’s student of global and local history.

It has also recently inspired Gene Luen Yang, author of the award winning graphic novel American Born Chinese, to publish a two-volume graphic novel entitled Boxers & Saints (2013). In this work of historical fiction, Yang tells the story of two lead characters who each portray a side of the struggle, Boxer and Christian. As the book’s own summary lays it out:

In two volumes, Boxers & Saints tells two parallel stories. The first is of Little Bao, a Chinese peasant boy whose village is abused and plundered by Westerners claiming the role of missionaries. Little Bao, inspired by visions of the Chinese gods, joins a violent uprising against the Western interlopers. Against all odds, their grass-roots rebellion is successful.

But in the second volume, Yang lays out the opposite side of the conflict. A girl whose village has no place for her is taken in by Christian missionaries and finds, for the first time, a home with them. As the Boxer Rebellion gains momentum, Vibiana must decide whether to abandon her Christian friends or to commit herself fully to Christianity.

A finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, this graphic novel seems a useful entry point for students who will be investigating academic studies of the Boxer Uprising as an historical event, including ones that Yang himself has cited as influential background reading for his own novel. Prominent among these studies, as it happens, is the award-winning work of my dissertation adviser, Joseph Esherick, whom I consider a leading candidate for this coming year’s scholar-interview for my students… (Sidenote: Joe, 不好意思, I’ll be in touch before long!)

So my students will start with a graphic novel, but they will be reading diverse academic studies as the focus for their literature reviews, debating different approaches, and thus becoming experts on the subject, which should also provide them with a new perspective on a work of very engaging historical fiction as well.

NEXT FALL’S DIGITAL PROJECT

Here’s where my plans get muddier.

Again, I want to have my students working with primary sources alongside the secondary sources that are the core of the colloquium.

There are rich collections of primary sources available online in English (and other languages) thanks in part to the fact that this event happened in 1900 and so many books and newspapers sit available in full-text online, freely available before copyright restrictions fall on them. There are also a fair number of photographs that can be found online in archival collections.

One disadvantage, though, is perspective: the sources my students will be using will be entirely English or European-language based (except in the rare case, my students generally do not have Chinese language capability — and certainly not classical Chinese necessary for documents from 1900.) So they’ll be working exclusively with sources from a certain perspective amid what is in many ways a colonialist conflict… On the other hand, of course, this may make for an excellent teaching point and add plenty to explore.

The more fundamental question is simply what will they be designing?

Here’s what I’m imagining for a digital creation, rough in form so far, suggestions for directions, further fine-tuning, warnings of pit-falls, etc., all welcome:

One of the main audiences for Boxers & Saints is the Young Adult (“YA”) audience. It’s a book that sits in many high school or middle school libraries. My students themselves are only a few years away from those same school libraries and classrooms. At the same time, I have a significant number of students who are also training as dual History and Education majors to return to teach in those schools. Why not embark on a digital project in which students are using their experience studying the Boxer event to create an online curricular resource of their own, openly available for K-12 students and teachers both to use?

I could see the students exploring textual and visual sources, individually having to choose one of each, then writing up their own contextualization — origins, location (again, perhaps mapping these?), authorship, any associated data, and then also composing a set of related questions for discussion to accompany those sources. They could work in groups, providing peer-feedback. Modelling and testing lesson plans? I could also have them do an analytic write-up for me, as background to those questions, as a graded assignment.

Some analytic dynamics that may come into the discussion (and perhaps, or perhaps not, the site?)

– dynamics of only having, it might seem, one side — the Western side – of the story in the dominance of Western sources?

– can one read other sides in the texts and images through missing elements, traces in the pictures? (There are some secondary readings here that may assist with this analysis, incidentally.)

– what’s the relationship between historical fiction and history as written by scholars? Graphic novels and textual scholarship?

Could this, or something related, come together as a website for students in K-12 who might be reading Yang’s graphic novel and want to learn more — and see more — of the actual history? A website with texts and images and Q’s for a class that’s reading the novel to dig into? Would it be something their teachers might find useful?

What digital elements would complement this project? Further it?

Should I be more (or less) ambitious?

Suggestions from any high school or middle school teachers or librarians? I’d love to expand the conversation…

Post-script: Meant to add these links to the original post — for more on Gene Yang’s Boxers & Saints, see his interview at The New Yorker and also Wesley Yang’s review in The New York Times. The video trailer for the work (all our works should have video trailers now, no?) can be found at First Second / Macmillan Publishing here.

The focus is also two-fold at the start, though I’m sure the conversation will develop in more diverse directions. Participants are all veterans of last year’s “Domain of One’s Own” project in which faculty on our campus explored their own digital scholarship and identities through domain creation as part of a university initiative. Now, this semester, we’re building on that experience through a bi-weekly conversation in which participants in small cohorts will be sharing individual projects in digital scholarship for close feedback.

At the same time, we’ll also be engaged in a broader, “meta” conversation about digital scholarship itself. What are the standards by which our diverse fields define it — or are beginning to define it? How does digital scholarship relate to, differ from, or overlap with supposedly more “traditional” forms? How is digital scholarship influencing our work in the classroom and in curricular development? These questions are just starting points, and the conversation will be evolving as the semester continues. I’m very much looking forward to digging into the details…

Well, okay, the typewriters are a bit of an old-fashioned juxtaposition here (and yes, no cigs), but this image is one of many that echo this past semester’s workshop methods course, Hist 297: History Colloquium. Chaos, collaboration, some good communication, an occasional mess, and some real productivity.

Preface…

It was also a first run of a revised methods course for our department. As I’ve previously noted, we’ve just taken a one semester course, required of all History majors, and made it a two-semester sequence. The one-semester course was ambitious, as most of them are. And we’d decided that it would be more productive to allow the students to work through this curriculum at a more balanced pace. At the same time, having two semesters would also provide us the room for further development of that curriculum and its implementation. A win for all.

The idea has been to leave the the focus for the fall to historiography and literature reviews–a “history colloquium”–with faculty choosing a broad theme for their own courses, while still emphasizing the same fundamental skills in the process. The spring semester course is then be turned over to student research on self-designed projects in primary sources, still in a seminar setting.

One piece of the story… TaipingCivilWar.org

My colloquium this past fall focused thematically on China’s devastating 19th century Taiping Civil War (1851-1864). One aim of the course was to help students acquire a “digital literacy,” a departmental goal. I incorporated multiple components in this regard, including exercises re: digital identity and digital portfolios (particularly in relation to UMW’s own path-breaking Domain of One’s Own project — “one of the very best things in ed-tech right now” as Audrey Watters has noted.) And simpler, self-intro assignments utilizing digital tools.

The mainstay, however, was my students’ own collaboration in creating an online resource on the Taiping Civil War itself — namely a website entitled TaipingCivilWar.org.

While I’ve had students create their own blogs, compose for course discussion sites, even edit gifs and tweet for courses before, this is the first time I’ve worked with a class that has created its very own website as a public resource. The process has highlighted some interesting issues:

“Digital Literacy”…I’ve left this one in quotes because it’s often a term associated with an “outcome” to be met, and with a definition that’s not always clear–and sometimes it’s indeed better left that way for the sake of flexibility. Still, we might ask, what are our ambitions in this category? In what ways can or should we incorporate the so-called “digital” to best serve our curriculum? Our students?

A devil’s advocate might say that we’re pouring old wine into new bottles or playing with widgets (figuratively as well as literally.) So, we might ask: what’s pedagogically innovative that’s being added amid instruction in methods and the introduction of digital resources? What’s fermenting here?

How might we constructively, amid the development of a digitally inflected curriculum, change the way we approach a methods course?

Critical Thinking…Ever a challenge, always the aim? How does this ambition relate to our use of digital resources in a history course? The website assignment here offers a case study. In many ways, the project invited students to take an inside-out view of a work of secondary scholarship, in this case, that of Jonathan Spence’s God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan(1996). Reading this book as the first assigned text for the class, students then worked extensively with Franz Michael’s epic 3-volume collection of translated Chinese primary sources, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents(1971), cited frequently in Spence’s work.

Sifting through the primary sources, and working with excerpts they chose, students worked together in small groups to compose an online map and timeline of the civil war. Another group also composed an annotated bibliography of secondary works utilizing Zotero and interviewed another scholar on the Taiping topic (more below.)

All students also composed blog posts in which they examined Spence’s own use of primary sources from Franz Michael’s collection in his composition of prose for his study. In doing so, they were gaining their own perspective on historical research. Dissecting the way a scholar uses primary sources in all their intricacies and ambiguities, in constructing his own argument from the ground up, students gained a critical understanding of the steps–and occasional educated leaps–a historian makes.

As the students composed their own narratives in timelines and maps, too, they also avoided what can often seem a passive consumption of a secondary text. Not only did they read Jonathan Spence’s book, but also almost literally took it apart and reconfigured it. They read it from the inside out as they were simultaneously engaged in their own forms of composition–plotting a selection of sources in space and time–from the same primary texts. Online.

Authorship…

Indeed, in composing their timelines and maps from an overlapping collection of primary sources, students also engaged in a parallel authorship. And, while admittedly less ambitious an undertaking, it was still a very real one. For in fact their website is a text that is openly available and penned with the students’ names, offered for a public audience of other students of the subject.

A nice touch was that students also had the simultaneous opportunity to interview an author of another work on the Taiping conflict, Dr. Tobie Meyer-Fong (Department of History, The Johns Hopkins University), whose recent work What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China(2013), was another monograph we read for the course. A third group of students worked with UMW’s Speaking Center to prepare for their interview with Dr. Meyer-Fong, then conducted the interview and transcribed it for the website. It now accompanies the annotated bibliography on the topic of the Taiping Civil War that students created and have shared via a Zotero group they also created.

The students’ conversation with Tobie Meyer-Fong was wonderfully productive as it offered an account not only of the joys but also the practical challenges of research shared by a scholar fresh from finishing her own excellent study. Next semester, the same students who engaged in this conversation will move to the second half of our methods seminar. They’ll be jumping into the challenges of defining their own research projects and exploring primary sources, of pulling meaning and analysis out of a complex mix in the archive. Hopefully this interview will make a for a good springboard as they head that way…

Collaboration…

Finally, if there’s one thing the website project brought to the curriculum beyond a prescribed digital infusion it’s the creative engagement that comes through collaborative work. For me, this aspect was one of the joys of the course.

Our greatest co-author in this respect was none other than Ryan Brazell, Instructional Technology Specialist at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, who not only shared his expertise in the design and management of the digital frames for our website this past fall, but also shared his great talent for instruction in the classroom itself. Many people can do tech, many people can communicate, both not many people can truly communicate tech. Ryan can do both, teaching undergrads brilliantly, and do it with a sense of humor & timing that rivals the classic comedians.

Ryan has also composed an excellent post on the design of the website for the course. I highly recommend it. A tweet Ryan shares at the end, a student quote from one of his workshop visits, made my day… I’d point any instructor there amid fears, early in a course, that digital elements are turning into their own jungle gym for students to climb over, or get stuck on permanently. Once the students have made it through the early learning curve (steep though it may seem), the payoff often arrives.

The website project also invited, well, yes, demanded a significant level of student collaboration, as all group projects do. And, as often the case with group work, the results were slightly mixed as there were some who didn’t quite pull their weight (for diverse reasons… )

The incorporation of collaborative assignments seems nevertheless valuable, particularly when one considers a future after the degree is earned. Part of the value of the web project, then, lay in helping students build experience in working in groups, in defining project goals and strategies through shared communication, and in negotiating divisions of labor.

It’s a skill that many professionals (cough, professors?) could probably work on too. And a piece of the pedagogy I’m going to keep developing for next time around. I tried to balance the inevitable challenges of mixed student commitment with differentiated systems of evaluation — i.e., a separate group grade and individual grade, with each reflecting effort toward the website assignment and online work. I’m still looking for better ways to evaluate, guide, and encourage students to build their own skills in group work, however.

Do you have a good strategy or lesson plan for helping students improve their approaches to collaboration or group work? Suggestions, thoughts, and feedback very much welcome on this score, as for any and all of the above…

Collaborative projects shared by a gang of creative and generous folk are all-out awesome. Yesterday, looking ahead to a slightly lighter schedule over the winter break, I dropped a tweet to several current students with an interest in China & Taiwan, and also to one alum who is currently in graduate school at National Taiwan University.

I’ve been thinking that it’d be nice to find new ways for our current students to network with others who’ve studied or worked in China (and, now as I’m thinking of it, East Asia more broadly). I see students in office hour visits who are in the first steps of trying to figure out how to get from Fredericksburg to Beijing, Taiwan, Shanghai. And they’ve got important questions about daunting, if intriguing projects:

– how do I build a true fluency in Chinese? (A: get thee to a very good intensive program abroad…)

– where can I find funding for this kind of language study?

– Or, are there internships in East Asia to be had? Teaching opportunities abroad after graduation?

In the past, I’ve mentioned a few programs and often tell them of this or that UMW alum who’s travelled that path before them. But why not use social networking and the ready tools of the ‘net to help them connect with peers? Or find new ways for peers to share the resources they’ve discovered?

Our students have done a great job in finding programs and winning scholarships (cheers to Joseph Calpin and Shirley Martey for excelling in this effort!) So we’re jumping in, brainstorming some ideas, and kicking the project off. S.

Suggestions welcome as it percolates…

Here’s the Twitter convo that rolled on the topic yesterday, with some great ideas added already:

Yes, I’m prepping for fall. But I’m also already thinking about a second go at my cinema course next spring, along with fellow traveller Jim Groom, who recently blogged about our foray into GIFs with that class.

For films, I’m seriously thinking of dropping Jia Zhangke’s “The World” this time around, along with previously screened “Chungking Express,” and going with a Wong Kar-wai double feature of “In the Mood for Love” (2000) and “Happy Together” (1997). The films are in some ways more challenging (some might say more opaque, while some might offer another kind of critique), and the first one — “In the Mood” — is usually one I use in my Gender course. I may use it in both courses, or trade it out in the Gender course for Ang Lee’s “Wedding Banquet.”

But in any case, both films are gorgeous to watch, and both focused not only on Hong Kong, but also on inter- and trans-national themes (“Happy Together,” for one, is set in Argentina), as well as issues of gender, sexuality, memory, violence, and time. I’m working up a reading list to accompany them. Suggestions welcome, as always…